"The hunger for Indian land was most intense in the Southern slave-owning states, and Jackson as a politician generally reflected Southern economic interests," Wallace writes. He also wanted it as a way to further white supremacy and slavery, and to shore up his Southern support. "Andrew Jackson had a personal financial interest in some of the lands whose purchase he arranged."īut Jackson didn't only want removal for personal enrichment. From 1815 to 1820, he served as a federal treaty commissioner dealing with Southern Indians, and "persuaded the tribes, by fair means or foul, to sell to the United States a major portion of their lands in the Southeast, including a fifth of Georgia, half of Mississippi, and most of the land area of Alabama," the anthropologist and historian Anthony Wallace writes in The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians. Jackson's support for Native American removal began at least a decade before his presidency.
Robert LindneuxĪny evaluation of Jackson must begin with American Indian removal, his policy of coercing Native American tribes into leaving their historical territory and embarking on dangerous and often deadly relocations. Andrew Jackson, ethnic cleanser The Trail of Tears.
If that weren't enough, he was a war criminal who suspended habeas corpus and executed prisoners for minor infractions during his time as a general in the War of 1812.Īndrew Jackson deserves a museum chronicling his crimes and dedicated to his victims, not commemoration on American currency. Jackson's small-government fetishism and crank monetary policy views stunted the attempts of better leaders like John Quincy Adams to invest in American infrastructure, and led to the Panic of 1837, a financial crisis that touched off a recession lasting seven years. The historian Daniel Walker Howe writes that Jackson, "expressed his loathing for the abolitionists vehemently, both in public and in private."
He owned hundreds of slaves, and in 1835 worked with his postmaster general to censor anti-slavery mailings from northern abolitionists. Indian removal was not just a crime against humanity, it was a crime against humanity intended to abet another crime against humanity: By clearing the Cherokee from the American South, Jackson hoped to open up more land for cultivation by slave plantations. And as a slave owner, putting him on the other side of Tubman's bill is particularly disgraceful.Īfter generations of pro-Jackson historians left out Jackson's role in American Indian removal - the forced, bloody transfer of tens of thousands of Native Americans from the South - a recent reevaluation has rightfully put that crime at the core of his legacy.īut Jackson is even worse than his horrifyingly brutal record with regard to Native Americans indicates. Jackson was a disaster of a human being on every possible level, and should not be commemorated positively by any branch of American government.
It's a fitting, and long overdue tribute to a genuine hero of American history who helped end the gravest evil this nation ever perpetrated.īut the department also announced that the man currently on the bill - perhaps America's worst president and the only one guilty of perpetrating a mass act of ethnic cleansing - will still be on there: Andrew Jackson. On Wednesday, the Treasury Department announced that a portrait of Harriet Tubman will grace future $20 bills starting in 2030.